Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain by Richard Davenport-Hines Review
Non-Fiction Espionage Cold War History Book Review by Lord Mark Pack
Glad I read this but… (long explanation follows!).
Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain by Richard Davenport-Hines makes a paradoxical first impression. It has over 600 pages, with a long index and voluminous collection of endnotes, not one but five opening quotations before the main text starts, a narrative about communists and the Cambridge spies in the UK that digressively starts in nineteenth-century Russia and then meanders back to Elizabethan England… and yet, for all that, it starts with an apology for how little the book contains and how much has been omitted from a book that is merely “a few hand-picked artefacts”.
The author comes with impressive academic credentials and a long track record of writing well-received books. Some of those academic formalities – such as the copious references – are still there in the book. But also, there is, it appears, a more relaxed approach to the writing and editing than in carefully honed academic writing. He relaxes into giving his opinions much freer rein. His very acerbic comments about many other spy book authors are, at times, a welcome, bracing alternative.
He rightly highlights how anyone who has, say, relied on reading Chapman Pincher’s books has had only a very selective and controversial perspective. Yet his disdain for others often seems to run well ahead of putting together a case to persuade the reader.
Most strikingly, in being very dismissive of the likes of Peter Wright (SpyCatcher) and the idea that Roger Hollis was a Russian spy, he states with certainty that the claimed mole codenamed ELLI was the famous Russian spy, Kim Philby. Yet the identity ELLI, or even whether the original evidence of such a spy was mangled and misunderstood, is at the heart of the Hollis controversy. So the book tells us very clearly on which side the author stands in that controversy, but little on why or what his evidence is.
For all that, there is much value in his dismissive iconoclasm of so many previous authors. He makes an interesting case that a pervading sexist culture in the intelligence services is frequently neglected as an explanation for the wider set of attitudes shown by many male intelligence officers who messed up in various ways.
He also makes a very strong case that dismissing blunders and incompetence as being a symptom of the spy services being run by a posh elite, looking after their own and being too trusting of their own, misses how in reality many of these people were not posh upper class but rather middle class, and that many of the cover-ups were in fact the necessary result of an understandable reluctance to have to present intelligence details in open court, which is what would have happened if people had been prosecuted instead.
There are also huge amounts of fascinating detail, such as just how effusive pro-Stalin sentiment was for a brief period in the Second World War, including a triumphal tour around Britain of a ceremonial sword to be presented to Stalin, culminating in queues at Westminster Abbey to see it.
All that makes it something that shouldn’t be your first, second or third book to read on this subject.
But if you are a good few books into your knowledge, it is a welcome corrective at times – on occasion, very persuasive (especially on the middle-class background of many key figures) and, sometimes, rather less so (such as in his more general attempts to explain away a culture of amateurism). And for each author he disdains, there is plenty of follow-up material online and in other books if you wish a more rounded view before making up your own mind.
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